Saturday, January 28, 2012

iTuned: tips, techniques and tools for tidying iTunes tracks

Having a tidy iTunes
Library is increasingly important. The name “iTunes” is a misnomer now that Apple’s free app also manages
movies, music videos, TV shows, iBooks, audiobooks, podcasts, university
lectures, ringtones, internet radio streams, voice memos and iOS apps. All up,
it is an overabundance of media to organise—some of us now have terabytes of
content.

This post provides some pointers on how to organise your iTunes Library. While some of the tips
have broader application, the focus is on the medium where it all started: music.

Why bother cleaning?

I’ve seen (and cringed at) friends’ libraries full of tracks
with no identifying information beyond a song Name like “09 smile.mp3”. How can
they ever find what they are looking for?

With a bit of TLC, you can transform your library so that
you can effectively search for your media. Moreover, you can then use advanced iTunes features such as Smart Playlists
and Genius Mixes. For example, if you have set the Genre appropriately across
your music, you can quickly play your Jazz standards. If you’ve applied Ratings,
it is easy to screen out your less favoured tunes. If you have a full set of
album Artwork, you might flick through your albums using the gorgeous Cover
Flow view. If you’ve added Lyrics, you can finally decipher what Kurt Cobain
was singing.

The value of a clean library is even more noticeable when you
sync or stream your media to an iPod, iPhone, iPad or Apple TV: you will be
able to use your device’s menus to rapidly find your music and movies.

If you buy all your content from the iTunes Store, you
probably have a very clean library. But most of us mix in tracks ripped from
CDs or, worse still, illegally copied from friends or downloaded from torrents.
Your tracks may even be missing fundamental information like the Name, Artist
or Album.

If your library is small and in good shape, then some manual
fine-tuning will do the trick. But if you have a large, messy library, you’ll
need to use a combination of iTunes functions,
third party tools and elbow grease to train your library into shipshape.

Preliminary steps

The first thing I’d recommend is—assuming you have the
space—storing all your music together on a single internal or external drive.
The settings for this can be found if you go to the “iTunes” menu; select
“Preferences…”, and click on the “Advanced” tab. There you can choose the
location where your media will be stored. You should also select a couple of
options. Firstly, turning on “Keep iTunes Media folder organized” will make
sure that all your media is appropriately named and arranged in folders.
Secondly, switch on “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library”—that
way, when you import any new media, it will be automatically coped into your
consolidated library. Finally, to make sure any stray media files are copied to
your library, go to the “File” menu; select “Library: Organize Library…”; turn
on the “Consolidate Library” option, and click “OK”.

In recent versions, iTunes
has another useful option. While the app used to intermingle different types of
media, it will now separate them into high-level folders (“Music”, “Movies”,
“Mobile Applications” etc). Simply go to the “File” menu; select “Library:
Organize Library…”; turn on the “Upgrade to iTunes Media organization” option,
and click “OK”. If it is greyed out, you have already done it!

Now, at least, you will have all your files in one place
with a well-ordered top-level folder structure. But there’s so much more
tidying that can be done if you want to be able to efficiently use your media.

Basic information

At the very least, I suggest that each track needs a Name,
Artist and Album. If you want to listen to an album in the way its creators
intended, it is also worth using Track Numbers. Additionally, it is constructive
to set Genres, so that you can find types of music.

If you are importing your music from a CD into iTunes, it will automatically look up
this information as long as you keep on the “Automatically retrieve CD track
names from Internet” option found under the “General” tab in “Preferences…”.

But you may have tracks missing this basic information. If
you’re making the effort to get these right, I’d recommend setting yourself
some standards. I try and aim for some consistency in the way I use these
fields: appropriate capitalisation; no stray spaces and, of course, I put the
track numbers in the Track Number field, rather than the Name.

Different people use Genres in different ways: some prefer
to have fewer broader labels (Pop, Jazz, Classical); others opt for more
specific descriptors, for example differentiating Vocal Jazz from West Coast
Jazz. What you do here depends on your tastes and the width of your collection.
But I’d encourage you to be consistent and avoid Genres such as “Other” or
“Miscellaneous”.

Sometimes, all of the information is there, but in the wrong
place. For instance, the Name is in the Artist and vice versa. Or the Name is a
tangled “Lou Reed – Berlin – 10 Sad Song”. Rather that manually changing every
track, you can use AppleScripts. You install these in your user Library/iTunes/Scripts
folder and select them from the AppleScript menu in iTunes. There are plenty of scripts available on the Internet. I recommend
Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes and Hubi’s iTunes Scripts.

An alternative to using AppleScripts is an application
called Tune•Instructor. Accessed from
the menu-bar, it has a number of tricks up its sleeves including search &
replace, capitalisation and tag swapping.

There are also some handy tools that take your library and
make suggestions on how to make tracks more consistent; e.g. merging “Police”
into “The Police” or “REM” with “R.E.M.”. Song
Sergeant does this, but only for Artists and Albums; beaTunes covers a broader range of tags including Genres.

Finding missing details

What do you do if some of the basic information (like Name
or Artist) is missing? You can do searches on sites like Amazon or the iTunes
Store to try and ascertain missing information. But that can be awfully
time-consuming and you might not be able to identify the track. Better still:
use one of the many tools that will do it for you. Most will work
automatically, but I’d always advise some manual proofing.

These tools fall into two categories that work in one of two
ways. The first category includes tools like MPFreaker and TidySongs.
They look for gaps and then use whatever information is already present to
assist in a search; they’ll then suggest plugs for the gaps. For example, if an
Album-less track is named “You Can Call Me Al” and the artist is “Paul Simon”
the software will probably suggest the album ought to be “Graceland”. The
problem with this method is the song could also be from the “Concert In The
Park” live album.

Applications in the second category are smarter. These
include beaTunes, Jaikoz, MusicBrainz Picard, Rapport,
SongGenie, Tagaligious and TuneUp. These tools rapidly analyse each
song and generate an “acoustic fingerprint”, a concise digital summary that they
then match against a database. If you’ve used the Shazam, SoundHound or MusicID song recognition apps on an
iPhone, you’ll have used similar technology.

The different tools referred to here use a couple of
different databases to look up the missing data. Most use the AmpliFIND
(formerly MusicDNS/MusicIP) and/or MusicBrainz database; TuneUp uses the Sony-owned Gracenote MusicID. Surprisingly and
frustratingly, the data in these databases are not always internally consistent,
but they tend to be pretty good.

In my tests using a library with a range of different
problems, the acoustic fingerprint tools far outperformed the others. While it
has some shortcomings, my favourite tool is TuneUp—in
my tests it had the highest accuracy combined with support for the most types
of tags and an easy-to-learn (but not perfect) user interface.

Advanced information

Now, at least you can identify your songs with their
complete Names, Artists, Albums and Genres. iTunes
actually stores many more details for each track. Some of these data are stored
in what are called “ID3 tags” inside the song’s file; these include the Name, Artist,
Album and Track Number. Other metadata are stored in the various iTunes Library
files found inside your iTunes folder. Album art can either be stored inside
the file or in an impenetrable array of Album Artwork folders.

If you select “Get Info” on a single track in iTunes, you’ll see a dialog box with the
many data you can edit, particularly under the “Info” tab.

While many of the details are self-explanatory, some are not.
For instance, the Disc Number should be used for multiple disc albums. So,
rather than naming an album “All Things Must Pass (Disc 1)” and “All Things
Must Pass (Disc 2)”, the better approach is to name both discs “All Thing Must
Pass” and set the Disc Numbers as “1 of 2” and “2 of 2”. iTunes will automatically keep both discs in a single folder and
retain an appropriate play order.

BPM stands for “beats per minute”. I’d expect most people to
leave this blank. If you are DJ, however, setting the tempo of each track could
be useful. Fortunately, beaTunes can
automatically determine and complete the BPM information.

What about the “Part of a compilation” checkbox? The best idea
to do is to mark it on for discs that have multiple artists (and keep it off for
“best of” retrospective albums from a single artist). The reason for this is
that iTunes stores discs under artists’
names. If a multiple-artist album is not marked as a compilation, you’ll end up
with an underlying folder structure with lots of single-track discs.

To confuse us further, back in version 7, Apple added an Album
Artist tag (as distinct from the standard Artist tag). For a single-artist
disc, this might be the same as the Artist but can also be used for, say,
storing and being able to find a U2 tribute album under U2’s name.

The “Grouping” tag is designed to be used for movements
within a classical composition.

Under the “Video” tab (which confusingly still appears even
if you have selected a song), you can set information relevant to TV shows
including Season and Episode Numbers.

The next tab along is “Sorting”. The various Sort tags are
used if you want to manually override the way iTunes sorts tracks. For example, while iTunes understands the English articles “The” and “A” and will sort
“A Night At The Opera” under “N”, you could optionally do this with “Les
Misérables”; but, generally, you can leave these all blank and let iTunes do its thing.

Next comes the “Options” tab. Here, among other things, is
where you tell iTunes what type of
media the file is. You can individually set a Volume Adjustment for the track,
or use a utility like iVolume to do
it automatically. You can also give your track a Rating from zero to five
stars.

The final two “Get Info” tabs are “Lyrics” and “Artwork”. If
your songs are properly named, iTunes
might be able to find the Artwork for you when you use “Get Album Artwork” in
the “Advanced” menu. You can also copy Lyrics and Artwork from your web browser
and paste them directly into these tabs.

But who has the time do to such heavy lifting? You are
better off using a tool to do this. While Jaikoz,
MPFreaker, Tagalicious and Tune•Instructor
cover (pun intended) Artwork, I’d opt for TuneUp
or CoverScout for Artwork. Lyrics
lookup can be done by a range of applications, notably Jaikoz, MPFreaker, SongGenie, Tagalicious and Tune•Instructor.

Duplicates

It is easy to end up with duplicate songs in your library,
for example, if you have imported the same CD twice. To save space, you may
want to delete one of them. It is a little harder to know what to do when you
have the identical version of a song on different albums, say the original
album and a “Best Of” compilation. Alas, iTunes
has no “alias” function like the Finder. Some users prefer to keep both
versions, so they can listen to the albums with integrity. Others figure they’d
rather sacrifice this for speed and space and keep only one version.

iTunes has its own
“Show Duplicates” in the “File” menu that will show you the tracks in your
library that have identical Names and Artists. It is too rudimentary: it will
equate songs of totally different lengths. The command becomes a little more
useful if you hold down the Option key: the item becomes “Show Exact Duplicates”:
now Album and Track Number must also match before the tracks are classified as
duplicates.

Once again, there are third party utilities that make the
job of identifying duplicates easier. While TidySongs
and beaTunes help the process, better
tools are Song Sergeant and Dupin. Jaikoz and TuneUp also identifiy duplicates based on acoustic fingerprints.

Coda

I realise that most users are not going to invest the time and money to make their iTunes Library spotless. But for those pedants like me, using some or the entire medley of techniques here will make using iTunes a more productive and satisfying experience.